The Inspiron 1100 uses as much of the system memory as it needs, up to 64MB, depending on the amount of system RAM. The video card itself only has a small amount of RAM, and that is all that will appear in the BIOS.

The Inspiron 1100 uses the integrated Intel 845GL video chipset. The video card uses shared RAM with the computer system. Up to 32MB of shared memory with 128MB of system memory and up to 64MB shared memory with 256MB of system memory.

The Inspiron 1100 uses the integrated Intel 845GL video chipset. The video card uses shared RAM with the computer system. Up to 32MB of shared memory with 128MB of system memory and up to 64MB shared memory with 256MB of system memory.

This is why overall performance will lag with the lower RAM configurations. For this particular computer, 512MB is as ideal of a setup that you can hope for. You get the full 64MB allocated for video and the remaining 448MB for applications, etc. We have an 1100 and when we upped the RAM to 512MB we saw a noticable improvement in performance. An 1100 with 128MB of RAM is a crippled machine, IMHO.

That is a little confusing because I called up Dell Support regarding my Inspiron 1100 a couple weeks back on the phone and when I asked them how to change the amount of memory allocated to video they said that it would automatically change it based on the total amount of memory my system had. Furthermore, when I inquired into how much RAM would be required to get above 1MB of video RAM the tech support told me they don't have a chart or specific details beyond that if I upgrade to 1GB of RAM I will have 32 MB of dedicated video memory. I didn't like that I had to go all the way up to a GB to be able to have more video but I accepted it. So is there something I am missing here or will my video memory always read 1MB in the bios?

Your BIOS will probably always read 1 MB of video RAM. There are many windows tools that will tell you how much video RAM you actually have. One very handy one is the Direct X diagnostics tool. In order to run this tool just go to start | run and type "dxdiag" without the quotes. Once it is done analysing your system, you can click on the Display tab and see the "Approx. Total Memory"

I forgot to mention that the Intel 845 chipset on up use a dynamically allocated amount of video RAM. Just because dxdiag shows that you have 32 MB or 64 MB allocated for graphics does not mean that amount of memory is actually reserved for graphics all the time. It just means that the graphics subsystem can use "up to" that amount of RAM. In reality, RAM is dynamically allocated to the graphics subsystem as needed up to the maximum amount allowed. That means that normally when you are at your windows desktop, a much lower amount of RAM is actually allocated for graphics. On most computers, I think the base amount when running Windows is around 8 MB.